


encounter, overview, excerpt

by akissontitan



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 style but it's actually 4+1 because i say so, F/F, diary format, first person/third person pov switching, gays in space, lup is a bully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 18:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10623048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akissontitan/pseuds/akissontitan
Summary: “The stars look beautiful tonight.”Lup's voice is high-pitched and grating, but at such a low volume, it’s not so bad. Lucretia looks up, first to the elf woman before her, and then out to the vastness.“Yeah.” Lucretia’s lungs feel tight.“You know what -whoelse - is beautiful, Lucretia?” There’s something about the way she says it.Lucretia.Their names start with the same sound, a weird and bad coincidence, but it’s like her Elven tongue is dancing over the syllables."Who?""Me."





	

**Author's Note:**

> when lup was 7 she had a crush on a girl in her class and didnt know how to deal w it so she wrote her a letter that just said "get out of my school"
> 
> enjoy my new ship, that hopefully will also be your new ship, Thank's

**Lup Interaction - Recorded Encounter 1: Day 3**  
**Subject: Playing games**  
**Overview:**  
I’m not sure about the twins, Lup and Taako. Granted, I’m not sure of anyone, almost ever, but there’s something unsettling in the way they talk, move. They speak to each other in the presence of other people; performative, with sass and sarcasm, like parading themselves verbally is the same as a real conversation.

It’s not the same. It’s very rude, actually.

No one talks much to them either. Captain Davenport says to give it time. That we’re all loners and a bit awkward, but we’ll grow close.

Lup and Taako don’t seem awkward, though. They seem like they know exactly what they’re doing. And like they’re excluding everyone else from their plans on purpose.

It could just be me. In the past, it HAS been me, and my insecurities. But. Still. There are little signs.

 

**Verbatim excerpt:**  
“Gun to your head,” Lup starts, and Lucretia sighs internally from over by her reading nook. _This_ game again. As if circling this strange planet isn’t weird and stressful enough. “Who out of the crew would you fuck?”

Taako, beside her, wrinkles his nose in distaste. “I mean like, not really the finest pickings for me here. Not into the shorties, and Bluejeans is certified Property Of Lup, trademark-symbol. So guess I’m left with Magnus.”

Lup nods, considering. “Fair. Fair. Guess it’s easier for me. More genders to choose from.”

“Oh _please_ , don’t even play, you’re _already_ fucking Barry.”

“Yeah, but like—“ she clears her throat, voice just a smidgen louder now, “If I had the pick of the _whole_ team? I dunno. Maybe I’d go with someone different. You know I dig the girl-next-door thing.”

Lucretia draws her legs to her chest, but doesn’t let her eyes wander from the book in her lap. Though she hasn’t said a word, when the twins giggle, she feels like she’s the punchline.

 

 

**Lup interaction - Recorded Encounter 2: Day 12**  
**Subject: I refuse to believe she came up with this joke herself**  
**Overview:**  
The deck is undoubtedly the place to be if you wish for peace and a good view aboard the Starblaster. Though not silent, with the thrum of the engine, the scenery bestows a sense of smallness and calm. I like it up here. That’s not anything worth writing down, though.

What’s noteworthy is that Lup seems to enjoy the “fresh” “air” out here too. Everyone comes and goes, when we’re travelling between planets as we are now, but she and I are the only two you would really expect to find settled up here, at any given time.

Not TOGETHER, or anything. She has her side of the bow. I have mine. I write or sometimes read, she vapes.

Sometimes, though, she’ll talk to me.

I don’t know what that means, or if it means anything. Or why I’m writing about it, when there are more important things to document, in my more important journal. Whatever.

 

**Verbatim excerpt:**  
Lup blows grape-scented smoke out into the blue-black of space, but of course, the forcefield keeping them protected from the atmosphere bars it from getting far.

“You know those things aren’t good for you, right.” Lucretia snips, quiet, without looking up from her journal. She knows Lup isn’t flavouring their pocket of air _just_ to annoy her, but it feels like it.

“Relax. It’s just a glamoured lollipop I stole off Magnus. As if they’d let me on this ship with anything fun.”

“Oh.” She pauses, feeling stupid. That makes sense. She exhales, measured, and cracks her knuckles before picking up her quill.

She gets about twelve words in, none of them particularly good, before Lup speaks again.

“The stars look beautiful tonight.”

Her voice is high-pitched and grating, but at such a low volume, it’s not so bad. Lucretia pauses her hand again, looking up, first to Lup, and then out to the vastness.

“Yeah.” Lucretia’s lungs feel tight, even though Lup’s fake vape is now magic’d back to its original form.

“You know what - _who_ else - is beautiful, Lucretia?” There’s something about the way she says it. _Lucretia_.Their names start with the same sound, a weird and bad coincidence, but it’s like her Elven tongue is dancing over the syllables.

Lucretia swallows. “Who?”

Lup is looking at her now, and- she’s never been one for romance or talking or _people_ but, if she—

“Me.”

A final, disgustingly loud suck on her lollipop, and Lup is gone, blinked some place below deck. Lucretia can hear laughter even though the metal, and she grips her pen tight and hopes she chokes on her stupid candy.

 

 

**Lup interaction - Recorded Encounter 3: Day 22**  
**Subject: Are all elves this lewd**  
**Overview:**  
Lup… isn’t shy. I don’t consider myself shy either, to be fair – just *careful*. There’s a difference. But Lup really, truly, is NOT shy. The opposite of shy. Bold. Extroverted. GROSS, even.

(I know “gross” is not a good antonym in this context, but she is also very VERY gross.)

 

**Verbatim excerpt:**  
It’s only breakfast time, but Lucretia is already in that space where the words are _flowing_ \- she barely has to think them before they’re written, simultaneously, on the crammed pages of her journals. It’s their first morning orbiting a new planet, investigating in suspicious, low-flying orbit around the continents as they have learned to do. She is a vessel through which descriptors can come, inference on the architecture they can make out, the travel patterns, the straight lines of their rivers, and—

“God, look at Lucretia go! If she can destroy paper with both hands at once like that, just imagine what she could do to my pussy!”

Magnus chokes on his juice, and Taako laughs so hard he snorts. Davenport tells Lup to knock it off, but the full extent of his stern temper hasn’t quite arisen from bed yet.

The words in her stutter, and stop. Lucretia doesn’t know how many pages she’s written just here over breakfast, but she knows when to call it quits. She takes half a bagel and a juice box for the road, and tries to keep her head held high as she walks back to her private quarters.

She feels Lup’s eyes on her the whole way.

 

 

**Lup interaction - Recorded Encounter 4: Day 29**  
**Subject: A little sour, a lot sweet**  
**Overview:**  
I have alluded to it in previous entries where she was not the focus, I’m sure, but it warrants saying outright: Lup is getting nicer. Maybe she’s bored of Barry and out for something new. Maybe the Captain has spoken to her, or Taako. (JK – it definitely wasn’t Taako.)

I’ll admit: I’ve scouted my official journal for hints as to the motivations behind her change in her behaviour, but IDK. Maybe she’s just slow to trust. I get that.

Regardless. She’s getting nicer. Not all-the-way nice, like Magnus claims he *isn’t*, but still.

Sometimes I wish there was another woman on this ship. To ask things. Merle seems like a good father figure to Magnus, and even Taako though he insists he doesn’t need it. But I just want a second opinion. Because I have a hypothesis – I think Lup is mean to people when she likes them.

(Addendum: Like, LIKE-likes them.)

 

**Verbatim excerpt:**  
Before Lucretia even entered the mess hall section of the cabin, she could smell it. Chili con carne, a favoured recipe of the twins. They cook it “New Elfington-style”, meaning the mince was a composite of ground mealworm and shredded cricket, but that’s not what has Lucretia’s stomach churning.

Capsicum. Tomatoes. _Chilies_.

She _had_ thought that maybe being shipped off from her planet might mean she’d never need to eat another red vegetable in her life, but, as luck would have it, turns out they preserve pretty good, for long space voyages and such.

With all the courage she can muster, Lucretia reaches for a plastic bowl. She has to eat _something_ , and there’s no digestible food on shitty bio-luminescent plane they’re currently visiting.

Magnus already discovered that.

Just as she’s about to line up for her nasty, gory fate to be spooned out to her, she feels a tug on her jacket. Lup is crowding her, suddenly, close up to her face like she’s got some kind of a secret.

“I know Chilli Chwednesday isn’t really your thing, so uh.” Lup scratches her neck, face still close but eyes turned down, “Whipped you up a quick alfredo special. Extra cricket, for crunch.”

Lucretia softens. Puts down the empty plate and takes up the offered one, filled with safe, creamy pasta. She grins, looking back up at Lup and inhaling breath to thank her, but-

“B-Because you’re too much of a shitty little baby human to uh, handle our supreme chili, haha, l-loser!”

She’s gone in a literal blink, leaving Lucretia with her dinner, and a soft smile.

 

 

**Lup victories – Recorded encounter 1: Day 34**  
**Subject: LUCRETIA STRIKES BACK**  
**Overview:**  
I know her game now, I think.

Maybe not all of it. Maybe no one can know *everything* of elves and twins and beautiful women. But I know enough to play. I know enough to win.

I know that, if she feels something positive towards me, I think I feel it in return. I know I can’t “know that I think” something, linguistically speaking. But there have been lots of examples of rules being broken, and new things being discovered, in just the month we’ve been out here.

I want to discover more things. With everyone. With her. I want h **/// /**

Oops. I’m getting distracted.

 

**Verbatim excerpt:**  
Lucretia wraps her hand around the cooling metal of the deck’s railing. She’d been curled up writing for so long that the muscles had begun to cramp, and she took that as a sign that maybe she should move around for a while, so she moved as far as she could on an airship as big as the Starblaster.

She doesn’t mind how contained their living space is, really. Her heart feels calmed by it. In a world - _worlds_ \- as big as this, it feels grounding to spend a large portion of time somewhere safe. Somewhere with familiar and welcome nooks and faces.

Fingers soothed, Lucretia takes out the bigger of her two journals from under her arm, and rubs the feather tip of her quill over her nose, as if that might stimulate the flow of words.

“Congrats. Think you almost took a full minute break from writing, that time.”

She can’t help but smile at Lup’s voice from across the deck, and her footfalls, too, as she comes to lean on the railing next to her.

“Don’t tell the Captain. You know how he hates a slacker.”

Lup snorts. Crunches at the candy in her mouth. Lucretia watches as her smile turns _cheeky_ , as it is so oft wont to do.

“Hey. I know money is a redundant concept and late capitalism should be left on our dead planet, but. I’ll slip you 50 GP if you record in your diary that I’m the hotter twin.”

Lucretia’s own smile turns mischievous, now.

“Oh, _Lup_. I’ve already _thoroughly_ documented that.” With a quick tap at Lup’s chin, Lucretia spins on her heel, and walks towards the stairs down into the cabin.

After a long moment of shocked silence, she hears Lup’s gleeful, grating, nasty laughter behind her, and it’s music to her ears.

**Author's Note:**

> my twitter is [@ nycreous](http://twitter.com/nycreous) PLEASE be my friend im so lonely
> 
> if you like this please comment!! It sustains me!! I really wanna know if the format was easy and enjoyable reading - i struggled HARD to make it work on ao3. Did you pick up quickly that they first person was lucretia's diary, and then we did a weird screen-wipe to the scene she was writing about?? Did you Not??? Did you enjoy it regardless, or any specific piece of dialogue? Are u just mad i implanted my leasbean seed in ur brain? Tell me all abt it!!! And thanks so much for reading xxx <33


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